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ECOP, 3001
QUESTION 1
“Examine the role of ‘unfree’ labour in the development (and survival? ...
In examining the role of unfree labour in the development of the capitalist mode of production, one must thoroughly identify five main factors in order to understand the processes that make it. They include identifying: the different forms of unfree labour; the relationship between the capitalist imperatives and non-capitalist modes of production; the degree to which the benefit of capitalists from unfree labour was passive or actively structured the politics of ‘free’ labour towards unfree labour and; the extent to which ‘unfree’ labour remains a relevant category for contemporary capitalism.
Any definition of what constitutes unfree labour has to begin by focusing on the labour-power of the subject as private property, and hence as an actual/potential commodity over which its owner has disposition. Unlike a free labourer who is able to enter or withdraw from the labour market at will, due to the operation of politico-ideological constraints or extra-economic coercion, an unfree worker is unable to personally sell his or her own labour power (in other words to commodify it), regardless of whether this applies to employment that is a time specific duration (for example, contract work, convict labour, indentured labour) or of an indefinite duration (chattel slavery). Unfree labour is a means by which capitalists and rich peasants “cheapen, discipline and control workers (usually rural) by means of deproletarianisation”. Therefore, unfree labour depends on the owner providing sustenance, either as a consequence of reciprocal obligation or because it is constrained by threatened violence from acting autonomously. This economic and politico-idealogical decommmodification of labour power constitutes a process of restructuring or workforce recompostition whereby capital replaces more costly free labour with less costly unfree variants.
Unfree labour exists in many forms within the capitalist world. ... Slavery would be considered the first form of unfree labour that has existed throughout time. It was originated in ancient Greece and Rome where Athenian democracy depended upon slave labour, and the expansion of imperial Rome was fuelled by the capture of slaves (eg. ... Slavery typified most pre-feudal societies and all early empires, whereby it provided labour power for production but also acted as disincentive to industrial innovation (i. ... if labour power is essentially free, then replacing labour with power may not appear cost effective). Perhaps the best form of voluntary recruitment coupled with an unfree production relation is famine slavery, a work arrangement which arose historically in times of “great scarcity, when self enslavement was the only alternative to starvation and death”. Chattel slavery is another form of unfree labour that to some degree still exists within today’s society. Also know as a form of “debt bondage” , this form of unfree labour, tends to exist in circumstances “where cash or kind loans advanced by a creditor (a landlord, a merchant, a moneylender) are repaid in the form of labour services by the debtor personally and/or by kinsfolk (poor peasants or landless labourers)”. This relationship between the two parties entails the loss on the part of the debtor and/or kinsfolk of the “right to sell their labour-power at prevailing free market rates” during the period of bondage. Unlike chattel slavery, where the person of the slave is itself the subject of economic transaction, in the case of the bonded labourer it is the latter’s labour-power which is bought, sold and controlled without the consent of its owner. Hence the frequent conflation of bonded labour with the free wage relation, notwithstanding the fact that while a free wage labourer may personally dispose of his or her own labour-power (by selling it to whomever he/she wishes, or withdrawing from the labour market altogether), neither a chattel slave or a bonded labourer posses this right.
Approximate Word count = 3104
Approximate Pages = 12.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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